Cricut Design Space Features You're Missing Out On

This could change the game for you. Some of the things on this list are going to blow your mind. Y'all, this is a game changer when it comes to designing. First of all, did you know you can move an object? Most crafters get so frustrated that they can't figure out what to do. Are you using design space to its full potential? If you don't know the answer to that, good chances are you probably are not. And y'all, in today's video, I am going to be showing you some hidden features that I feel like are so underutilized in design space that this could change the game for you. If you are new here, my name is Lauren and I'm a craft producer here at Makers Gonna Learn where we strive to bring you inspiration, education, and motivation to get crafty. And y'all, let's be honest, sometimes design space is one of the things that keeps us from getting crafty because of lots of different reasons. But in today's video, I'm gonna be showing you some hidden features that hopefully make using design space so much easier. And y'all, I really think that some of the things on this list are going to blow your mind so you're gonna want to make sure you stick around to the very end. So with that being said, let's go ahead and hop over to Cricut Design Space so that I can show you some of the hidden features that I bet you are missing. Okay, before we actually get into design space, we're gonna start here on the Makers Gonna Learn website because I'm gonna grab a couple files and I have a pattern that I have created inside the Makers Gonna Learn Studio. So I'm gonna grab this file here, this Merry Christmas file. There you can see the pattern that I have generated from the MGL Studio. And then I'm gonna grab this You Grow Girl because I'm gonna use all of these as examples to show you how you are under utilizing design space. Now, if you are not an MGL Plus member, you get access to all of these files if you become an MGL Plus member. We have launched a new studio inside our Makers Gonna Learn membership where you can generate your own SVGs or PNGs that are Cricut ready right here within your membership. You can convert PNGs or JPEG SVGs with a dragging and dropping of an image. And we have a new background removal tool. Now, I'm not gonna go into all of that here, but just know that I did generate my pattern here with the Makers Gonna Learn Studio. So let's just go ahead and hop over to design space and let's start talking about some of the hidden features. So before we go to the upload section, which is really where we're gonna get started, I want to start here. So first thing, and I feel like a lot of people know this, but just in case you don't, you can quickly cycle through the grids here on your canvas by clicking this little square up here in the corner. That's one that I feel like is more widely known, but I just wanted to let you all know, and you can easily change the background color of your canvas down here in the corner by clicking this little white square and changing it to whatever background color you want. This is especially helpful if you are creating things with offsets that have like a white offset and you wanna be able to see it. So I'm just gonna leave it gray for right now because I think this is really going to help us. Now, let's go to the upload section because there are quite a few things in this upload section that I feel like are not being utilized to their full potential. So first up, we have Pattern Fill. Now, if you've never used Pattern Fill, this is something that you can use when it comes to print and cut designs, but did you know that you can upload your own patterns? Now, we're gonna talk about Pattern Fill on in the video, but you can upload your very own patterns here. If you just scroll over from Image to Pattern Fill, you're going to click here and Upload Pattern. I'm going to bring my finder back into view here. Here's this pattern that I created with the MGL Studio. You can see, I can drag and drop it. You can change your pattern name. I already have it named Pattern MGL Studio. We might even name it Abstract Retro, whatever. Let's go Abstract Retro because that's what it's giving me right now. And then we can click Upload. Now, once again, I'm gonna show you where we're gonna find that pattern here in a minute, but this right here, hold onto this, put this in your back pocket and stick with me because this is going to be one that I think blows your mind later on. So next up, let's move on to uploading your very own images. When you go to Upload Image, you know that you can upload JPEG, PNG, GIF, SVG, HEIC. See, now they have added that very easily here. Now, I'm going to do a PNG just to show you how you can kind of turn a PNG into an SVG. So I have this Retro Merry Christmas here, and we're gonna go to Continue. Now, first of all, did you know that you can, without having Cricut Access, manually erase the background? You can do that by selecting Colors. So if you zoom in, you can select the colors here just like this, or you can erase. Now, when you erase, it is a little bit harder to get it right, but just know that you can erase. You can also preview a single layer. So when I go to Preview Single Layer, let's just actually go ahead and select because let's say I wanted to use this as a single layer Merry Christmas. I don't want this drop shadow. I'm just going to erase all of this here. It looks like it is erasing it perfectly fine. You can see it's a little wonky there, but we can click through it. And then once you have like that drop shadow erased, you can go to Apply and Continue, and then you can do a single layer. But here's the thing. When we go to Upload, it is still not completely what it needs to be. You can see all of these little pieces here, and that is a problem when it comes to trying to take a PNG and make it a single layer by erasing certain features. Here is what I want to show you. So back over here to Upload, when you go to Upload Image, you can bring that same file back into Design Space, go to Continue. But when you scroll down, number one, you have, you can reduce colors. We want to keep that unmodified because I do not want to reduce the colors here. But if you are having trouble erasing certain colors, you can play around with this Color Tolerance. Now there are lots of ways to do this. First thing I would do is, number one, up that Color Tolerance. Let's start off with 100. So before we dive into Color Tolerance too much, I want to give you a breakdown of what it actually is so that you can understand it when it comes to working with it. So the Color Tolerance tool in Cricut Design Space controls how picky the Select tool is when it comes to deciding what colors to remove from an uploaded image. So in short, Color Tolerance tells Design Space how similar neighboring colors have to be before it treats them as the same colors. So a lower Color Tolerance removes colors that only closely match the exact color or the exact area that you clicked, while a higher Color Tolerance removes a wider range of similar colors, including the lighter and darker shades. So you do have to play around with it. One thing I want to be clear is, don't think you can just up the Color Tolerance to this high amount and that it's automatically gonna work. So, and let me show you exactly why. Here, I have automatically put it to 100 because the Color Tolerance of 16 was not working. But when I come in here and start erasing, everything looks great when I'm going through here, but did you see what it did? So it erased that pink and that cream because we upped the Color Tolerance so much that it considered it a similar color. So that's why you have to kind of play around with that Color Tolerance and find that sweet spot. So for this one, I'm gonna move it to a 40, and now I can come in here and erase all of this cream drop shadow, and what it is doing, whereas before when the Color Tolerance was 16, it was not getting rid of all of that cream color, but when I play around with that Color Tolerance and I find that sweet spot so that it's not too much and it's not too little, kind of like Goldilocks, not too soft, not too hard, just right, we can now easily remove pieces of a PNG design that we do not want to easily help us create an SVG or a single-layer file out of a multi-layer file. So here is this now. You can even click on that Preview Single Layer, see if there's anything I missed. Looks like that right there. We can go ahead and erase, and by the way, you can erase when you're in that single-layer mode. Then we can go to Apply and Continue. We want this as a single-layer graphic, and boom, look at those clean and crispy lines. That is one of my favorite things when it comes to uploading in Design Space and how I like to manipulate files and make them what I really need. Now, I am gonna go ahead and upload that other file that we had here, and I'm gonna upload it as an SVG. Now, there's no real trick. I was just uploading it to be able to show our next thing, which is one that is a somewhat new feature that I feel like so many of you all may not be using yet with a little bit of a twist. So this feature is a newer one that you're gonna find under Effects, and that is going to be this sticker feature. Now, in past, if you've been around our channel, you have seen us talk about how this Create Sticker used to be a Cricut Access function. It is now just a straight-up Cricut Design Space tool that anyone who has Cricut Design Space can use. One thing I do want to be clear is the larger your file is, the kind of smaller the offset is when you do a standard thickness. So when you go smaller, let's say with your sticker, so this is actually gonna be, if we were creating a sticker, it's probably gonna be closer to a four-by-four. You can see that this is your standard offset that it creates, or you can do a thin. That one's going to separate things out. You can do a wide, or you can do your own custom-size border fill. So this is going to be pretty much the same thing as your offset, but it goes ahead and creates it as a sticker, and you can decide if you want this to be a kiss-cut sticker or a completely cut-out die-cut sticker. Now, if you do choose die-cut, you can turn on and off if you want an Easy Peel Edge. So what that does is it die-cuts through this outer layer, kiss-cuts this inner layer. That way you can take this off, and now you have an Easy Peel Edge sticker. And y'all, that is something that saves us so much time. We no longer have to duplicate and attach different layers. This just makes it so much easier. But I don't want to stop there because the little secret sauce for this one is going to be one that I think blows your mind. So coming back over here to my border fill colors, let's say I wanted a different color on the interior of this sticker. And actually, let's just go completely back and let's change these colors to something completely different. So let's make this one like this green. We'll do this color green. And then we will put this, choosing this sticker, we'll put this on, coming down here to advance, on like a really light purple background. Now, this looks fine as is, but what if I told you, you could add a black offset to this sticker to really make it pop? But we're gonna have to come back over here to our effects, and we're gonna have to go back to sticker, and we're gonna have to undo the sticker first. So if you wanted to create a, kind of like a black border or an offset on your sticker, because if you all have been in Cricut Design Space for any bit of time, you know that if you were to flatten something together, so let's say we create this offset, we apply, we'll make our offset white. Now, this is not the create sticker function, but right now it looks like it has like a fine black border around it. But when we go to select this all and flatten it together, we lose that black border. So sometimes I really like the looks of that black border. So what you can do, we're bringing this back over to a basic cut. I'm actually going to select, you can select either the You Grow Girl or the Vines. We'll just select the You Grow Girl. I'm gonna duplicate that. Then back up here at my functions, I'm gonna turn that into a pin function. Now, hear me out. Don't wanna lose you yet. I know it looks crazy, but now what we're gonna do is you can layer that pin function on top of the You Grow Girl. Now, you can do it with a little offset, kind of create like a splice effect. You can line it up perfectly. And on top of that, you can come up here and you can select the size if you want it a fine point, so a smaller. You can see extra fine makes it a little bit smaller. You can choose what a different color that you want. Now, you are gonna be limited to the colors that they offer you here. We can even go really big with a marker. That's way too big. Here is a gel. It's a little, it's nice, it's pretty thick. So you can see, but you can choose whatever thickness and whatever color you want. Let's just go back to fine point black. We're gonna move it there. Actually, let's go ahead and center that. It's wanting to be funky and do something crazy. Okay, so I had to kind of offset it a little bit to get it to work, but now what you can do, watch this. Let's even do it to the green. Let's go ahead and change it to a pin function. Let's move it over top of that, select it and kind of get it lined up the best that we can. Beautiful. And let's select both of those you grow girls because they did get moved a little bit. Now I'm keeping these in the group, so you can ungroup and it might make it a little easier. So now I can come up here to our effects. I can add an offset to the whole thing, apply. We're gonna change the offset to white and I can select all of that together and y'all flatten that. And it keeps that really thin black offset. So let me just show you what the both of them look like with and without. So here, when I come in here and select this and flatten it, here is without and here is the with. So it's going to make more of a difference if you choose a larger pin function. So let's coming back over here, let's change this back to pin. Let's make this more of a gel black. Here you can see that. And then when we go to flatten all this together, you can see that it now has a more distinct black offset around it. So just keep that in mind, but that is one way that you can elevate your stickers and make them stand out just a little bit more. Now, I'm gonna keep these here on the page because there's a lot more that we're gonna talk about here in just a little bit. And you can really see the difference there. But the next one is definitely one of my favorite. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna grab a text box. I'm just gonna type out my name. We're gonna change our font. We're gonna pick a beautiful MGL font. Let's just go with Adelia. That one will be great. And this one not necessarily has anything to do with the text. It's more about if you want to add embellishments and you want to get them lined up properly. So let's say I wanted to create some kind of border underneath the name or whatever. Lots of different things you can do. So let me just grab a circle and we're gonna bring all of this over here and I'm gonna show you how to do this. So this is all about aligning. And I don't think there is enough people using the alignment tool properly, in my opinion. So let's say I wanted to create some type of embellishment underneath my name, maybe with a larger circle here. Then we can duplicate. Now it is making it pretty small. So let's just say I wanted one here, one here. We'll do another one of these circles here to break this up. Maybe another one for the end cap over here. And then we'll select both of these, duplicate, and let's just say we wanted to bring these over here too. So this is also one that I love, like if I'm creating my own border or whatever. So you can, first of all, let's give a shout out to Cricut for these alignment tools. These are phenomenal, but you don't even need these to make this work. What you can do, you set your first one here, then you set your last one wherever you want it to be. Let's just even say it's down here somewhere. And this is where we want our little circles to end up. Okay, what you're gonna do is you are going to select all of these here. Now we don't need to select the name. Let's actually just select the circles like this. Okay, you're gonna come up here to align. We want to first align them vertically. And then here is where it's going to blow your mind. You can distribute these evenly, either vertically or horizontally. And because we have this on a horizontal line, we want to distribute these horizontally. Watch what it does. Boom, it spaces everything out exactly where it should be in alignment to your first piece and your last piece. Y'all, that is something that I definitely think not enough people are using. And then after you've done that, you can come down here to combine and you can you knot those together. And now you have a perfectly spaced little embellishment for whatever you want to do. So the next thing that I wanted to show you guys has to do over here with this layers panel. So first thing, let's say we went ahead and we grouped these together. We made a group. But then I decided I want to add a last name or I want to add a last initial. And then we type in the last initial, whatever, line it up however you want to do it. This doesn't look great, but you get my drift. If you want to then bring this into the group quickly, watch this. All you have to do is come over to your layers panel, select that, pull that group down, and then pop that into that group. And now that M is part of that group. Now it doesn't work, let me be clear. We can take it out of the group very easily, but if that group is not, that dropdown for that group, you don't have it dropdown, it's just going to move it behind the layers. So it's just going to, let me bring it over here. So you can see right here, this is the very top layer. So if you don't have this little arrow down, it's just going to move it behind these layers. However, if you have that arrow down and we bring that M back up here, we can move it in that group. And then when we click off, now that whole thing is grouped together. I love moving things over here on my layers panel up and down. That way I can quickly add them in. Now, let's go back to that pattern because I told you guys that I was going to be teaching you about patterns. I'm going to move all of this over here and we're going to come back over to our uploads and we're going to add that Merry Christmas back to our canvas. And I told you that I was going to talk to you about patterns. So this is going to be when it comes to print and cut, you can select a pattern to fill your print and cut image. Now you can't do this with a basic cut. You just have material colors here. But if you change this function from a basic cut to a print and cut, nothing's going to change there. But when you come up here to the colors, you can go to the print top and you can select color or pattern. And look, there is that pattern that we uploaded. And now it is the whole Merry Christmas is our retro pattern that we created with the MGL Studio. Now you do have to be careful and make sure that it is a solid pattern and it doesn't have any white. You can see here that I did not erase some of that white outline or the white part of the file. So you may need to play around with that, but you can create and upload your own patterns to use in your print and cut images. Now, while we are talking about colors and patterns, one thing that I want to teach you all how to do is utilize that hex code portion when it comes to selecting colors for your materials. Now you can come down here and you can do advanced and you can move this around, but sometimes it's a little bit harder to really figure out what color you need. So this is just a little trick of the trade. We actually have to start over here in our Chrome extension web store, and we're going to type in eyedropper tool, or you can just type in eyedropper. Now, the one that I want you to get is this color picker, eyedropper, and hex color tool. You're going to select that. You can see I already have it added. You're going to add that to your Google Chrome extensions. Your Google Chrome extensions are going to live up here on the top. You can see here, once you have added that, it's not going to show up up here like you see. You're going to have to click this little puzzle and you're going to have to pin that to the top. Now what you can do is when you have Google Chrome open, you can grab this color picker tool. We can hop back over here to design space. So let's say, for example, we wanted to match a color of this beautiful pattern. So I'm just going to add this to our design. And let's say we wanted to find one of these colors inside this pattern. What I'm going to do is back over here into Chrome, I'm going to select pick a color. Now I am going to, on my computer, it is command tab. I'm just switching between my windows. I'm going to make sure that I go to Cricut design space here. I'm going to open up Cricut design space and you can see I still have my color picker tool available. Now what I can do is I find the exact pixel. Now, because this one has lots of different pixels, you want to find the exact pixel that you want the color of. So let's say we wanted this bright pink right here. Once you have that hovering over the exact pixel, you're going to click on it. Then it goes away, but wait, we can pop back over here to Google Chrome. And now we have the RGB, the HSL, and the hex code that we can quickly copy. Pop back over to design space. And now we can change the color of whatever we're working on here, coming down to advanced. I've copied that. And now all I have to do is command or control V. And that is the exact color shade of pink that I was looking for. Y'all, this is a game changer when it comes to designing. Now, while I have this pulled up and talking about designing and getting things to match, let's say you're working on a different project. So I actually use this to create a bookmark. So one of the things, if you wanted to merge projects in design space, you can't really do it very easily, but I wanna show you how you can. So what you're gonna do is you are going to come up here to file. You're gonna click on new window. This is gonna open up a whole new tab of design space so that you can work on two different things at the same time. So let's just say I come over here to my stuff and maybe here's the bookmark that I created. Maybe I wanna bring that bookmark over to this new project. So if I select this, customize it, I can now work on this one, but I also have this one here, but this is the cool thing. And this is one that I actually just kind of discovered myself is you can select this. So I have all of this selected. I can copy. So you can either right click or command or control C. There are shortcut keys. These three dots show you. So for me, it is command C. If you're a PC user, it might be control or we can just hit that copy. Now watch, I can come back over here to this canvas, click over here and just command or control V. And look, there is my full bookmark that I was working on in a different window now copied and pasted into design space. That is gonna be a game changer for so many people here watching this video. I cannot wait to hear what you all have to say about that. Now, if you thought that those were the only hacks I had to show you, hold on because there's more when it comes to the Make It screen. So here's what we have going on. Let's go ahead and go to the Make It screen so that I can show you all of the different little hacks inside the Make It screen too. So now that we are here on the Make It screen, one of my favorite things to do is actually move things around and kind of move pieces to different places. Now, the first thing I wanna show you is I used to think that you could only use move one object at a time. First of all, did you know you can move an object? Yes, you can move print and cut objects, you can move regular SVG objects, you can move whatever you want to different mats. Now you can't move a print and cut to a basic cut. It's not going to allow you, but you can move it to another print and cut mat. But did you know that you can drag and select and move multiple objects at the same time? That is probably one of my favorite features is the fact that I can move multiple things at one time. And y'all don't ever let Cricut try to tell you that you can't fit certain things on a page because this right here clearly shows you that I just got rid of one full print and cut page. You can also, in that same breath, you can also hide selected objects if you don't want to print that at that time. Now, you can't go back, it's hard to go back and bring that hidden object back. You would have to go back and cancel the cut, then go back to the make it screen and it will pull back up perfectly fine. But you can move multiple at the time and you can hide. Now, you can also, when you move objects, you can create a new mat. So now I have four mats and maybe I move this one back to the first one by itself. If you want them all on different materials, you can separate them out and create new mats. Now, another thing that I wanted to make sure that I showed you guys that I think can be very helpful, especially if you are working with specific size materials, is you can change your material size. So if you are working with a piece of 8 1⁄2 by 11 paper that you're gonna cut this out on, you can change that so that you can see exactly where you can put it and it gives you parameters. And I think that is one that not a lot of people utilize, but can come in handy with very specific projects. Wow, that was a lot of information and a lot of different ways that you can start using Design Space to its full potential. That was so much information. So please go back and rewatch if you want to, because that's a lot to take in at one time. I just wanna make sure that you all are equipped with all of the knowledge on how to use Design Space so that you can truly be using it to its fullest potential, because I feel like most crafters get so frustrated that they can't figure out what to do or how to manipulate a file exactly like they want to. So that's why I felt the need to bring this updated hacks, ways to use Design Space to you so that you can be crafting like never before. And y'all, that is our heart here at Makers Gonna Learn. We always want to make sure that you are crafting to your highest potential, whether that is learning all of these hacks inside Design Space to use to your advantage, or creating your own SVGs, PNGs, patterns, cut files, whatever, inside our Maker Studio tools. And y'all, we have actually lowered our trial membership. So if you want to try out our Maker Studio and our membership, and you're not an MGL Plus member already, click that link down below, because our trial membership is only a dollar now. So make sure you click that link down below, try us out, you really have nothing to lose. For a dollar, you're gonna get to be an MGL Plus member for a week, where you get 20 download credits, and you get some credits to try out that Maker Studio to see if you love it as much as we do. No strings attached, just a dollar. Like I said, you've got nothing to lose. Click that link down below, if you're not part of the MGL family already. Now, if you have made it here this long, and you have stayed here, and you haven't already, click that thumbs up button, it's free 99. If you love the content that we bring to you, make sure you subscribe to our channel, and hit that bell notification, so that you can be notified every time we get crafty, or bring you new hacks to use inside Design Space, or any other design software. Thank you guys so much for being here, and I can't wait to see you guys in the next one. Bye guys.